Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Tierra Madre @ Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith 

Tierra Madre

Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

May 1 – June 20, 2025

Garth Greenan Gallery announced Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Tierra Madre, an exhibition of works on paper, paintings, and one large-scale sculpture at 545 West 20th Street.The solo exhibition is the artist’s first with the gallery since her death in January of this year. The show features a selection of drawings from the mid-’90s that harken back to the artist’s childhood, as well as a series of paintings that engaged her up to her final weeks.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s twelve-foot bronze, Trade Canoe: Making Medicine II (2024–2025), is the last of a series she first began, in painting form, in the early-’90s. Smith recalled accounts of older Native Americans scarred from the “gifts,” like blankets, brought by settlers in canoes. It was under the guise of trade that these settlers dealt many of their deadliest blows, from smallpox to land expropriation. In the work, these barbed gifts—from syrup-flavored coffees to Christian sacramentals—are piled into a final canoe for symbolic return.

In Memories of Childhood #10 (1994), Smith foregrounds a charcoal drawing of a child. Her fingerpainted rainbow is declared “state of the art” by a nearby newspaper clipping. Smith honed her iconic mixing of text and image during this critical period. The work is packed with youthful optimism and possibility: “Pow!” and “You’ve come to the right place,” read other fragments of text. The child’s world is furnished with sustenance like Sweetgrass and Bitterroot, given in boththeir common and taxonomic names. Yet, the work also nods to perils and difficulty. The child, occupying the crucifix-shaped cutout at the center of the composition, is being inducted into a “School of hard knocks.” A human brain is wantonly carved into its phrenological parts. The divine potential of childhood meets the hard limits of a confused social world.

In Tierra Madre: Amy Bowers Cordalis (2024–2025), a female figure floats in the center of the composition with her palms facing outward. Plentiful salmon arch above her head—perhaps a reference to Cordalis’s conservation work on the Klamath river. In Tierra Madre: Maria Curie (2024–2025), the female is armless, but connected to all manner of symbolic forms: skulls, limbs, leaves, and horses. The compositions call to mind da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, a comparison that Jaune Quick-to-See Smith made explicit in her 1992 The Red Mean: Self-Portrait. In contrast to da Vinci’s elevation of the singular, ideal (male) figure as the “measure of all things,” Smith positions the abstracted female form as the personification of nature itself, rather than a yardstick for creation. While each painting honors a specific woman, many of the Tierra Madres are faceless, egoless. For her decades of ceaseless advocacy for Native artists, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith no doubt belongs among this pantheon.

JAUNE QUICK-TO-SEE SMITH

Born in 1940 in St. Ignatius, Montana, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith was an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation. In 1980, she earned an MFA from the University of New Mexico. After the late 1970s, Smith had over 50 solo exhibitions, including at Kornblee Gallery (1979, New York), Bernice Steinbaum Gallery (1990, New York), Steinbaum Krauss Gallery (1992, 1995, 1998, New York), and Jan Cicero Gallery (2000 and 2002, Chicago). In 2004, the Milton Hershey School Art Museum (Hershey, Pennsylvania) opened Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Made in America, which traveled to Keene State College (Keene, New Hampshire). In 2023, she became the first Native artist to be given a retrospective at the Whitney Museum when they mounted Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map—the most comprehensive exhibit of the artist’s work to date.

Quick-to-See Smith received numerous awards, such as the Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, New York, 1987; the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters Grant, 1996; the Women’s Caucus for the Arts Lifetime Achievement, 1997; the College Art Association Women’s Award, 2002; Governor’s Outstanding New Mexico Women’s Award, 2005; the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, 2005; Visionary Woman Award, Moore College, Pennsylvania, 2011; Elected to the National Academy of Art, New York, 2011; Living Artist of Distinction Award, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 2012; NAEA Ziegfeld Lecture Award, 2014; the Woodson Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, 2015; a United States Artists fellowship in 2020; an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in 2021; an Anonymous Was a Woman Award in 2022; and the Artists’ Legacy Foundation Artist Award in 2023, among many others. She holds four honorary doctorates from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Massachusetts College of Art, and the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

Quick-to-See Smith’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida; Museum of Modern Art, Quito, Ecuador; the Museum of Mankind, Vienna, Austria; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.

Stephen Friedman Gallery, now the co-representative of the artist’s estate with Garth Greenan Gallery, will present a solo exhibition in London this June. Fruitmarket (Edinburgh, UK) will also mount Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Wilding in November—the first posthumous museum exhibition of her work.

GARTH GREENAN GALLERY

545 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.garthgreenan.com

Tales of Brave Ulysses @ Garth Greenan Gallery & Van Doren Waxter, NYC - With Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, Alan Shields, Richard Van Buren

Tales of Brave Ulysses 

Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, Alan Shields, Richard Van Buhren

Garth Greenan Gallery, NYC 

Through December 16, 2023

Van Doren Waxter, NYC 

Through December 22, 2023

Garth Greenan Gallery and Van Doren Waxter present Tales of Brave Ulysses, a two-venue exhibition which explores the personal and working relationships of four prominent Post-War American artists: Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, Alan Shields, and Richard Van Buren.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the dominant art world ideology of formalist abstraction, with its roots in Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, was being challenged by a new generation of artists. Centered in downtown New York, their artistic and moral values were tempered by the intense social and political struggles of the day. Eschewing Minimalism’s impersonal methods and dogmatic prescriptions, these four artists instead embraced craft and process— cutting, sewing, tacking, and pouring— upending traditional distinctions between media and rethinking established roles of artist and viewer. Loving, Pindell, Shields, and Van Buren were at the vanguard of this material revolution in contemporary art, a loosely defined artistic movement since referred to by critics as Post-Minimalism or New Informalism.

In the midst of this radical upheaval in art practice and criticism, these four artists forged an enduring personal and creative bond. While deeply influencing each other in both spirit and in style, each artist nevertheless maintained a distinctly singular voice and practice.

From the late 1960s onwards, Shields’s studio served as a frequent gathering place. He was famous for his boisterous persona and uncanny ability to do high-quality work while in the company of friends, behavior which aptly earned him the moniker, “Mr. Partytime.” This sensibility is reflected in his colorful large-scale installation, Maze (1981-1982), constructed of painted aluminum piping wrapped with vibrantly dyed and sewn canvases. One could interpret such a work as a playful riff on Minimalist predecessors, like Tony Smith’s imposing geometric monochrome Maze from 1967.

The artists’ individual relationships had their own flavor and function. Shields and Loving often had protracted conversations about art and art history. Shields and Van Buren, by contrast, almost never discussed art, save for the occasional shop talk about dealers and galleries. Despite the amount of time these four artists spent together, their visual lexicons would remain highly distinct.

Many of these artists describe influence as if it were occurring beneath the work itself, at a foundational level. “Influences are who you spend your time with,” Van Buren has said. The group always supported each other with camaraderie and good humor. Their differing sensibilities continuously demonstrated new possibilities for their individual practices. Van Buren— who notes that a family member’s intrusion into the studio during work hours can launch him into a “complete state of fear”—still tries to channel Shields’s preternatural ease in the studio. In a 1975 interview with Shields, originally published in The Print Collector’s Newsletter, Pindell broached what she called the “hostile question” directly, asking him which artists he admired. He quipped that it was H.C. Westermann, primarily for his acrobatic ability to “walk on his hands.” Clarifying his cryptic response, Shields went on to describe the enigmatic character of influence as something stemming from residual feelings one gets from another’s work—feelings that can be played with for a time, but not so long as to fundamentally alter one’s own personal expression.

Nevertheless, it would be impossible to deny obvious parallels among these artists’ respective crafts. Canvases have been freed from their rigid stretchers, which we see both in Pindell’s early monochromatic painting Untitled (1976) as well as in Shields’s Space Sisters (1972-1974). Some works recast the iconic Minimalist grid in new light, like Pindell’s cut-and- sewn painting Untitled #24 (1978-1979), Loving’s vivid quilted painting, Square (1973-1974), or Shields’s monumental delicately-threaded painting Hart Sunkist Lie (1969). One might say the same of Van Buren’s sculptural installation Untitled (1969/2023), where scintillating globs of translucent polyester are hung from the wall in orderly but irregular rows from bundles of fiberglass strands, like organic specimens in some scientist’s lab.

According to art historian Jenni Sorkin, for several of these artists, “embracing the historically low status of textiles was a way to reclaim personal histories and embed individual artistic practices with sublimated narrative content.” For Pindell and Loving in particular, craft was often seen also as a stand-in for race or gender, which would become major contexts for showcasing their work.

The Whitney Museum of American Art was a singular institution in facilitating these discourses. In 1969 and 1970 the museum acquired two of Shields’s works, and in 1969 he was included in their annual exhibition, the same year as his solo show at Paula Cooper Gallery. Loving had his first solo exhibition of hard-edge paintings at the museum from December 1969 to January 1970, a body of work he would soon abandon. Feeling constrained formally and conceptually, and feeling his work neglected to reflect his lived experience, Loving tore up his geometric canvases before stitching them back together again in improvised compositions. This act would catalyze an aesthetic he retained for the rest of his career, exemplified by iconic paintings such as Untitled (1973). Despite enjoying similar early success with his Minimalist sculpture, Van Buren would soon abandon it, producing delicate cast polyester sculptures that demonstrate a persistent fascination with chance, process, and the generative capacity of art. In 1971, Loving and Pindell would both be included in the Whitney’s controversial exhibition, Contemporary Black Artists in America, and the following year, Pindell, Loving, and Shields would appear together in the museum’s annual exhibition.

While New York City played a formative role for all of these artists, in the early 1980s Van Buren and Shields would leave the city for secluded Maine and Shelter Island, respectively. Nevertheless, their mutual creative and personal bonds would persist for decades.

Garth Greenan Gallery represents Howardena Pindell, Richard Van Buren, and the Estate of Al Loving. Van Doren Waxter represents the Estate of Alan Shields.

Tales of Brave Ulysses

Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, Alan Shields, Richard Van Buren

Van Doren Waxter and Garth Greenan Gallery co-published a fully illustrated catalogue to accompany the exhibition Tales of Brave Ulysses with two essays by Sarah Cowan (Assistant Professor of Art and Art History at DePauw University and author of Howardena Pindell: Reclaiming Abstraction, Yale University Press, 2022) and Amy Rahn (Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Maine at Augusta). ISBN: 978-0-9988755-4-5 - Softcover: 248 pages

GARTH GREENAN GALLERY

545 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.garthgreenan.com

VAN DOREN WAXTER

23 East 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021

www.vandorenwaxter.com

Tales of Brave Ulysses - Opened November 9, 2023

Art Green @ Garth Greenan Gallery, NYC - Hairy Who?

Art Green: Hairy Who?

Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

September 8 – October 21, 2023

ART GREEN

Immoderate Abstention, 1969 

Oil on canvas, 66 x 55 1/2 inches

© Art Green

Courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery

Garth Greenan Gallery presents Art Green: Hairy Who? The exhibition provides an overview of the artist’s work of the 1960s, his most formative decade.

In 1961, Art Green enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with the intention of studying industrial design. In his first year, however, the artist made a fateful shift to painting and drawing. Art Green’s career, and those of five other recent SAIC graduates (James Falconer, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum), was quick to launch. In 1966, these alumni held the first of what would become a legendary series of group exhibitions called the Hairy Who. The artists’ styles were assertively idiosyncratic, but most had trained with professors Kathleen Blackshear and Paul  Wieghardt and adapted some of their respective Surrealist and German Expressionist tendencies—features particularly noticeable in Art Green’s work. Green adds that teachers Vera Berdich, Tom Kapsalis, and Ray Yoshida had integral influence. By the end of the packed decade in 1969, Art Green accepted a teaching position at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, marrying Natalie Novotny in the same year, whose Art Institute education in pattern and fabric design became a strong and continuing influence on his work.

The work in the exhibition demonstrates the remarkable speed with which Art Green established a rich personal iconography consisting of archetypal images of ice cream cones, wood grain patterns, billowing flames, and perfectly polished fingernails. These same totemic images populate his work to this day.

In Absolute Purity (1967) Art Green places a supersized cone of soft serve dangerously close to a plump female leg that billows flames and smoke like an industrial chimney. To add to the confusion, the artist freely mixes visual modes from the photorealistic to the cartoonish. The result is an uneasy, centrifugal chaos. As the Canadian artist and critic Gary Michael Dault said of the painting, “there is so much going on it all has to be lashed together to keep it, you feel, from flying in your face.”

Art Green’s work is packed with paradoxes and impossibilities. Each is phantasmagoric but orderly. Items are fastened and balanced in agreement with the strict but inscrutable mechanical rules that undergird each universe. In paintings like Disclosing Enclosure (1968), Green ties spatial dimensions into a Gordian Knot. Two disembodied fingers unzip a two-dimensional face—revealing ice cream that oxymoronically bursts into flames. When an object is zipped open, showing itself to be a two-dimensional surface, it becomes three-dimensional in its new configuration. The counterintuitive logic and potent symbolism beg to be decoded, but any attempt results in a recursive paradox. The paintings are themselves a cycle of perpetual reconciliation and rupture.

Art Green’s work has been the subject of over 26 solo exhibitions, including nine at Phyllis Kind Gallery (1974, 1976, 1976–1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981–1982, 1983, 1986, Chicago and New York), three at Bau-Xi Gallery (1974, 1979, and 1983, Vancouver and Toronto), and one at Corbett vs. Dempsey (2011–2012, Chicago). His work has also been featured in more than 120 group exhibitions, including Human Response/Personal Torment (1969, Whitney Museum of American Art); Who Chicago? (1981, Camden Art Center, London); 12 Chicago Artists (1995, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.); and Chicago Imagists (2011, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin). In 2005, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Ontario mounted Heavy Weather, the artist’s first career retrospective. In early 2009, the CUE Art Foundation, New York hosted a solo exhibition of Art Green’s work, curated by Jim Nutt.

In the last decade, Art Green’s work was featured in What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to Present (2014, RISD Museum, Providence); Homegrown: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Permanent Collection (2015–2016, Art Institute of Chicago); The Next Generation: Chicago Imagists from the Smart Collection (2016, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago); Hairy Who? 1966–1969 (2018–2019, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), and How Chicago! Imagists 1960s–1970s (2019, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, University of London).

Art Green’s paintings are featured in the collections of major museums around the world, including: the Art Institute of Chicago; the Smart Museum of Art, the University of Chicago; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin; the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

Garth Greenan Gallery represents Art Green.

GARTH GREENAN GALLERY

545 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.garthgreenan.com

Gladys Nilsson @ Garth Greenan Gallery, NYC - New Works in Watercolor

Gladys Nilsson: New Works in Watercolor

Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

November 3 – December 17, 2022

Gladys Nilsson

A Stretch Too Far, 2021

Watercolor, gouache, and pencil on paper, 41 3/4 x 71 inches

© Gladys Nilsson, Courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery

Garth Greenan Gallery presents Gladys Nilsson: New Works in Watercolor, an exhibition of works on paper at 545 West 20th Street. The exhibition features a selection of the artist’s recent watercolors, all painted between 2021 and 2022.

Gladys Nilsson has always been fascinated by close inspections and careful depictions of human interactions – celebrating the small things that go along with getting through the day, and eying the awkward and unconscious things people do to themselves when they do not think anyone is looking. In Wheee (2021), a sizable woman perched on a tree branch cranes her neck downward, inspecting a diminutive man at the base of the tree, like a scientist discovering some new, curious species. Nilsson, in all her work, displays a great and admirable affection for human eccentricities and goofiness. Through frame after frame, she explores satiric and sympathetic peculiarities of simple human life. The awkwardness of such looming bodies, with her comical approach to simple existence and interaction, becomes a celebration of seeing others and being seen, of the musings of display and spectatorship.

A Stretch too Far (2021) features Gladys Nilsson’s winding, playful imagery. Over a dozen major and minor characters partake in the festivities—peering at, touching, bumping noses, and grabbing at each other. A mischievous green man pulls a woman’s fleshy pink leg into the second frame. A row of swimmers forms a frieze at the bottom of the composition, unaware of the drama unfolding above. To the left and the right of the work, various figures wrap themselves around the swaying trees. The work indexes her stylistic hallmarks, as she playfully resurrects canonical painting conventions—the diptych, hierarchical scale, horror vacui, and continuous narrative—while assigning new functions and meanings to each within her idiosyncratic graphical style.

Gladys Nilsson first came to prominence in 1966, when she joined five other recent School of the Art Institute of Chicago graduates (James Falconer, Art Green, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum) for the first of a series of group exhibitions called the Hairy Who. The artists’ styles were assertively idiosyncratic, but most had trained with professors Kathleen Blackshear and Paul Wieghardt and adapted some of their respective Surrealist and German Expressionist tendencies.Gladys Nilsson skillfully integrates elements of both in her playful investigations into human sexuality and its inherent contradictions. Gladys Nilsson was the first member of the Hairy Who—and one of the first women in history—to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973. In 1990, Gladys Nilsson joined the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she continues to teach today.                  

Since 1966, Gladys Nilsson’s work has been the subject of more than 50 solo exhibitions, including 16 at Phyllis Kind Gallery (1970–1979, 1981–1983, 1987, 1991, and 1994, Chicago and New York), two at The Candy Store (1971 and 1987, Folsom, California), and one at Hales Gallery (2019, London). Her work has also been featured in many important museum exhibitions, such as Human Concern/Personal Torment (1969, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York); Who Chicago? (1981, Camden Art Center, London); Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art (1992, Los Angeles County Museum of Art); Chicago Imagists (2011, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin); and What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present (2014, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence). Most recently, Nilsson’s work appeared in The Candy Store (2018, Parker Gallery, Los Angeles), Hairy Who? 1966–1969 (2018–2019, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Chicago Imagists from the Phyllis Kind Collection (2019, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago), and How Chicago! Imagists 1960s–1970s (2019, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, University of London).               

Gladys Nilsson’s work is featured in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Morgan Library, New York; the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.                   

Garth Greenan Gallery represents Gladys Nilsson.

GARTH GREENAN GALLERY

545 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.garthgreenan.com

Howardena Pindell @ Garth Greenan Gallery, NYC

Howardena Pindell

Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

September 15 – October 29, 2022

HOWARDENA PINDELL

Untitled #7 (Carnival, Bahia Brazil), 2022

Mixed media on canvas, 86 x 86 inches

© Howardena Pindell, Courtesy Garth Greenan Gallery

Garth Greenan Gallery presents a selection of mixed media works by Howardena Pindell, all made between 2021 and 2022. The exhibition features several recent paintings, as well as a selection of works on paper from her recent residency at Dieu Donné. A catalog, jointly published by Garth Greenan Gallery and Dieu Donné, accompanies the exhibition.

Untitled #7 (Carnival, Bahia, Brazil) (2022), like many of Howardena Pindell’s cut and sewn paintings of the last decade, is a celebration of color. Though the painting is unified by an expanse of fiery magenta, the saturated color of buried forms penetrates the monochromatic paint. Pindell’s iconic punched paper dots grace the surface with raw bursts of vivid color. The monumental work marks the artist’s return to the grid—a theme of particular interest to Howardena Pindell in the ’70s. The thick underlying surface occasionally ruptures, revealing the matrix of cut and sewn canvas below.

Howardena Pindell’s works produced during her recent paper making residency at Dieu Donné parallel the larger paintings—revisiting themes and techniques with renewed creativity and excitement that the artist first explored in the ’70s. Just as she deconstructs and reconstructs canvases through cutting and sewing, Pindell has embraced papermaking techniques as a way of circumventing the conventional treatment of the material as a two-dimensional surface, enabling an interplay of fore- and background, between subject and media. In Untitled #47 (2021), for example, Pindell meticulously places numbered chads into an embedded grid, layering translucent abaca paper on top, burying the chads into the surface as she often does in her dense painted surfaces.

Like her cut and sewn works, Howardena Pindell’s handmade papers take on new forms, suggesting new, idiosyncratic logical structures. In Untitled #21 (2021), the artist stencils layers of numerical symbols onto a loosely circular cotton paper. Each layer of numbers is, on its own, orderly, conforming to a uniform grid. But Pindell resets each layer with its own grid, scale, and color. Their legibility as number sets deteriorates, forming a mesmerizing dance of pattern and color.

Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Howardena Pindell studied painting at Boston University and Yale University School of Art and Architecture. After graduating, she accepted a position at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she worked for 12 years (1967–1979). She held the role of Exhibition Assistant in the Department of Circulating National and International Exhibitions, before transitioning to the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, where she worked as a Curatorial Assistant, Assistant Curator, and finally as the Associate Curator and Acting Director. In 1979, she began teaching at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, where she is now a Distinguished Professor of Art.

Throughout her career, Pindell has exhibited extensively. Notable solo exhibitions include Spelman College (1971, 2015, Atlanta), A.I.R. Gallery (1973, 1983, New York), Just Above Midtown (1977, New York), Lerner-Heller Gallery (1980, 1981, New York), The Studio Museum in Harlem (1986, New York), Wadsworth Atheneum (1989, Hartford), Cyrus Gallery (1989, New York), G.R. N’Namdi Gallery (1992, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2002, 2006, Chicago, Detroit, and New York), Garth Greenan Gallery (2014, 2017, 2019, New York), and Victoria Miro (2019, London).

Her work has also featured in many landmark museum exhibitions, such as Contemporary Black Artists in America (1971, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), Rooms (1976, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York), Another Generation (1979, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York), Afro-American Abstraction (1980, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York), The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s (1990, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York), Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African-American Women Artists (1996, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta), Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964–1980 (2006, The Studio Museum in Harlem), High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967–1975 (2006, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro), WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949–1978 (2009, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle), Black in the Abstract: Part I, Epistrophy (2013, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston), We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–1985 (2017– 2018, Brooklyn Museum, New York; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston), Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction (2017–2018, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida), Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950–1980 (2017–2018, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (2017–2019, Tate Modern, London; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Brooklyn Museum, New York), and Outliers and American Vanguard Art (2018–2019, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles). In 2018, Pindell was the subject of a major retrospective, Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen, which originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and traveled to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, through 2019.

The major traveling exhibition Howardena Pindell: A New Language, which opened at Fruitmarket (November 13, 2021–May 2, 2022, Edinburgh, UK), is currently on view at Kettle’s Yard (July 2–October 30, 2022, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK), and will travel to both Spike Island (February 3–May 7, 2023, Bristol, UK) and the Irish Museum of Modern Art (June 29–November 5, 2023, Dublin, Ireland).

Howardena Pindell is the recipient of numerous awards and honors. In 2019, she was awarded the Archives of American Art Medal by the Smithsonian Institution, the Artist Legacy Foundation 2019 Award, and the College Art Association 2019 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Howardena Pindell’s work is in the permanent collections of major museums internationally, including the Fogg Museum, Harvard University; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Princeton University Art Museum; the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University; The Studio Museum in Harlem; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Garth Greenan Gallery represents Howardena Pindell.

GARTH GREENAN GALLERY

545 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011 

www.garthgreenan.com

B. Wurth @ Garth Greenan Gallery, NYC - Monuments

B. Wurtz: Monuments

Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

June 23 – July 29, 2022

B. WURTZ

Untitled, 2018

Ceramic, red plastic object, blue plastic tacks, wire, 

metal and wood, 13 1/4 x 6 x 3 1/2 inches

© B. Wurtz, courtesy Garth Greenan Gallery

Garth Greenan Gallery presents B. Wurtz: Monuments. The exhibition includes a number of the artist’s playful sculptures and mixed media works deconstructing elements of scale and monumentality. The show is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

B. Wurtz is perhaps best known for his repurposing of everyday flotsam into joyous, humorous, and beautiful sculptural objects. The works in the presentation—spanning the past four decades of B. Wurtz’s career—amount to transubstantiations of the commonplace, exposing the enigmatic relationships between grandiosity and scale, modesty and pomp, humor and seriousness.

At times, B. Wurtz’s themes become explicit, as in Untitled (East Village) (1987). A simple found object is presented on a crude wooden pedestal. Behind the diminutive object is a print of it, scaled up and set against a gray sky. The viewer is positioned between two versions of the same thing, peering down at one and up at the other. In the print, the object is imbued with the monumental scale of an Aztec ruin. B. Wurtz’s dramatic elevation of an object as unglamorous as rubble tends to generate a cascade of reflexive questions: Does the promotion of the commonplace come with a commensurate downgrade of the much worshipped objects that sit behind reverent glass in museums?

The sculptures, pleasing in their visual immediacy, tend to reward even momentary reflection. In HA HA (1976), B. Wurtz encloses a handful of crumpled, Post-It-sized papers inside a clear plastic box. A note on top of the box discloses the work’s eponymous title “HA HA,” along with its author and date of completion. Despite scribbles that threaten to obscure it, the paper is still legible, unlike its crumpled cousins that are locked inside. There’s a certain pleasure to contemplating the work: Are the locked papers discarded jokes? Or are they promising ideas lost to relentless self-ridicule? The diminutive box portends a drama of creativity and self-doubt.

B. Wurtz’s forms are constantly probing at the nature of abstraction. In Untitled (1994), two metal hooks anchor wires that hold painted canvas flags. The flags are similar in pattern, but chromatically opposed. A narrative drama materializes with each hook resembling a boisterous partisan. The personification is typical of B. Wurtz’s particular taste for the mock heroic, with two identical hooks absurdly locked in ideological or literal battle. In the work, abstraction and representation, often discussed as opposites, are revealed to be dimensions of the same phenomenon.

In all the sculptures, scale plays an indispensable role, modulating the materials and their impact. In addition to the diminutive sculptures for which the artist is well known, B. Wurtz creates in the other extreme. In 2018, the artist completed his now-iconic Kitchen Trees for the New York City Public Art Fund, transforming City Hall Park with towering columns of colorful colanders exploding with plastic fruit. Taken together, B. Wurtz’s sculptures probe our conceptions of humor and profundity, reverence and play, scale and importance.

B. Wurtz has been the subject of over 52 solo exhibitions at prestigious venues, including: Feature Inc. (1987, 1991, 1992, 2001, 2003, 2006, New York); Gallery 400 (2000, Chicago); White Flag Projects (2012, St. Louis); Kunstverein (2015, Freiburg, Germany); and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2015, Ridgefield, Connecticut). In 2015, the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom mounted a retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work that traveled to La Casa Encendida, Madrid through 2016. In 2018, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles mounted a major solo-exhibition of his work, This Has No Name.

B. Wurtz’s work has also been included in over 174 group exhibitions, including: Pandora’s Box: Joseph Cornell Unlocks the MCA Collection (2011, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago); Building Blocks: Contemporary Works from the Collection (2011, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence); and Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s (2018, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.)

Garth Greenan Gallery represents B. Wurtz.

GARTH GREENAN GALLERY

545 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011 

www.garthgreenan.com

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith @ Garth Greenan Gallery, New York - Woman in Landscape

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith 

Woman in Landscape 

Garth Greenan Gallery, New York 

November 4 – December 18, 2021 

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Adios Map, 2021

Oil, acrylic, and collage on canvas, 50 x 80 inches

© Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery

Garth Greenan Gallery presents Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Woman in Landscape, an exhibition of recent works. The exhibition includes 15 of Smith’s thickly impastoed mixed-media paintings, along with a number of recent mixed-media works and sculptures.

In her new series of monumental paintings, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith rotates the American map, encircling the landmass in a sea of bead and basketwork patterns from the Plateau region. This simple but iconoclastic act dislodges the landmass from its contextual meaning.

In one painting, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith paints America in saturated color—each state a different swatch of red. A headline reads “In the Future we Will all be Mixed Bloods,” reflecting a reality which prompts routine paroxysms of racial anxiety in America. Smith’s use of red is unstable— subsuming its roles in racial persecution and affirmative Native identity, and with blood itself which is symbolic of mortality, racial lineage, and even life. Elsewhere, a patch of inverted letters reads “sdrawkcaB,” suggesting that this imagined post-racial “mixed-blood” future may turn out to be elusive. References to billionaire space excursions, by Elon Musk and others, suggests that a new colonial exodus may already be underway.

Maps have never been mere objective descriptions of landmasses. They have been instruments in the exercise of power and territorial expansion. Across the series, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith hints at the map’s many potential alternate meanings. Female fertility figures grace each canvas, asserting that the landmass is, foremost, Mother Earth herself. Pictographic turtles reassert America’s previous title to many of its inhabitants: Turtle Island. References to “India” recall Columbus’s geographic mistake that still reverberates in our language. Through the simple rotation, Smith notes, the map becomes a “thing of Indian power.”

Born in 1940 at the St. Ignatius Indian Mission on her reservation, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is an enrolled Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, Montana. Smith received an Associate of Arts Degree at Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington in 1960, a BA in Art Education from Framingham State College, Massachusetts in 1976, and an MA in Visual Arts from the University of New Mexico in 1980. Since the late ’70s, Smith has had over 50 solo exhibitions, including at Kornblee Gallery (1979, New York), Bernice Steinbaum Gallery (1990, New York), Steinbaum Krauss Gallery (1992, 1995, 1998, New York), and Jan Cicero Gallery (2000 and 2002, Chicago). In 2004, the Milton Hershey School Art Museum (Hershey, Pennsylvania) opened Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Made in America which traveled to Keene State College (Keene, New Hampshire).

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Quito, Ecuador; the Museum of Mankind, Vienna, Austria; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Garth Greenan Gallery represents Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

GARTH GREENAN GALLERY

545 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.garthgreenan.com

Cannupa Hanska Luger @ Garth Greenan Gallery, NYC - New Myth

Cannupa Hanska Luger: New Myth 

Garth Greenan Gallery, New York 

Through October 23, 2021 

Cannupa Hanska Luger

Future Ancestral Technologies ++ a generation of new myth ++, 2021 

Three-channel video installation

© Cannupa Hanska Luger, Courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery

Garth Greenan Gallery presents Cannupa Hanska Luger: New Myth, an exhibition of new, never-before-exhibited ceramic and mixed-media sculptures by Cannupa Hanska Luger, along with a new three-channel video from the artist’s ongoing Future Ancestral Technologies project. The exhibition is the artist’s first with the gallery.

Working in ceramic, textiles, and mixed media, Cannupa Hanska Luger crafts monstrous figures and vividly colored weapons that fill the gallery like remnants from an epic battle. Giant snake heads, thick black muscle fibers spilling out of their severed necks, rear their fangs shaped like the nozzle on a gas pump. The head of a three-eyed monster, Greed, lies on its side, its acid yellow tongue lolling out uselessly. A twisted hand, chopped off at the wrist, has its title, Ruin, tattooed across its knuckles in blood-red pigment, golden bite marks visible beneath a layer of matted blue hair.

Monster archetypes cut across cultural boundaries, continents, and time periods. “Today,” Cannupa Hanska Luger says, “we are once again plagued by monsters.” In these works, Luger creates a new mythology, manifesting societal ills as corporeal monsters and illustrating their destruction – complete with bloodied weapons – to “recognize the agency we have to slay our present-day monsters.”

The exhibition also includes regalia for two heroic slayer figures and a three-channel video installment in Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies, an ongoing project to create an immersive world of Indigenous science fiction. Luger describes the project as a methodology, a practice, and a way of future dreaming that harnesses the power of science fiction to shape collective thinking and reimagine the future on a global scale. Through installation, video, and land-based work, the series develops an ongoing narrative in which Indigenous people develop sustainable, migration-based technology to live nomadically in hyper-attunement to land and water. Within the limitless time jumps of Future Ancestral Technologies, Cannupa Hanska Luger challenges our collective thinking to imagine a post-capitalist, post-colonial future where humans restore their bonds with the earth and each other, asking us to consider how we will dream of our collective future. 

CANNUPA HANSKA LUGER

Born in 1979 on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, Cannupa Hanska Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, and European descent. In 2011, he received a BFA in Studio Ceramics from the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Cannupa Hanska Luger has received numerous awards such as the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts Multicultural Fellowship Award, 2015; the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship Award, 2016; the Museum of Arts and Design Burke Prize, 2018; the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, 2019; a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, 2020; and a United States Artists Fellowship Award for Craft, 2021. He has been the subject of more than 21 solo exhibitions and has participated in over 110 group exhibitions at venues such as Art Mûr (2014, Montreal), Princeton University Art Museum (2018, Princeton, NJ), Washington Project for the Arts (2017, Washington, D.C.), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (2018, 2019, Bentonville, AR), Gardiner Museum (2019, Toronto), Orenda Gallery (2017, Paris), the Autry Museum (2017, Los Angeles), the Museum of Arts and Design (2018, 2019, New York), and the Denver Art Museum (2021), among others.

His works are featured in the collections of many museums, including: the North American Native Museum (Zürich, Switzerland); the Denver Art Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (Santa Fe, NM); the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art (Norman, OK); the Luciano Benetton Collection: Imago Mundi (Treviso, Italy); the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT); and the Conley Gallery, California State University (Fresno, CA).

Garth Greenan Gallery represents Cannupa Hanska Luger.

GARTH GREENAN GALLERY

545 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.garthgreenan.com

Derek Boshier @ Garth Greenan Gallery, NYC - Alchemy Alchemy

Derek Boshier: Alchemy Alchemy 

Garth Greenan Gallery, New York 

March 25 – May 22, 2021 

DEREK BOSHIER 

Possibilities of Nature, 2020 

Acrylic on canvas, 66 x 96 inches 

© Derek Boshier 

Courtesy Garth Greenan Gallery 

Garth Greenan Gallery presents Derek Boshier: Alchemy Alchemy, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Derek Boshier, all made in 2020. Since his landmark early paintings that helped establish the British Pop Art scene in the 1960s, Derek Boshier has continued to combine popular imagery into visually stunning and intellectually confounding works. 

The exhibition includes several of the artist’s paintings, each containing Derek Boshier’s careful clustering of logically contradictory but psychically resonant elements. “I collect images,” says Boshier, “and like to use them randomly.” In spite of the inevitable meanings they produce, Derek Boshier’s juxtapositions are often the products of serendipity. The images, thoughts, and events that present themselves over the course of a day, or in the sequential pages of a magazine, are often non-sequiturs, yet occasionally create lasting and meaningful psychic impact. In his sprawling painting Afghanistan (Christmas Day) (2020), Derek Boshier relates the experience of handling Christmas wrapping paper while watching news of war in snowy Afghanistan. The jarring combination of smiling snowmen next to coils of barbed wire, blood, and bodies again suggests a cascade of meanings: about the extremes of human possibility in peaceful celebration and war, or about the links between our civilization’s polite opulence and its aggressive military adventures. 

In another painting, Black Dahlia (2020), Surrealism, pop-cultural scandal, and art history collide. The painting memorializes “LA’s greatest unsolved murder.” Boshier depicts Duchamp’s Étants donnés (1946–66), itself thought to be a possible reference to the brutal murder and dismemberment of Elizabeth Short that captivated the public. The suspected murderer was Dr. Hodel, a close friend of Man Ray and an obsessive collector of surrealist art. As in Man Ray’s Minotaur (1934), the victim’s arms stuck out from her truncated torso like the horns of a bull. Dr. Hodel’s own son publicly described the murder as his father’s “surrealistic masterpiece.” In Derek Boshier’s macabre work, black block-like forms meander like a staircase through the composition. A half-dozen men, dressed in mid-century suits, inspect something at their feet. Down the staircase stands a woman in a black dress. 

In the densely packed drawing Alchemy Alchemy (2020), dozens of medieval alchemists go about their work, dynamically filling every corner of the composition as in a Bruegel or Bosch painting. One alchemist pumps bellows into a raging fire while another pores over manuscripts surrounded by vials and potions. Derek Boshier overlays super-sized wrist watches that populate the scene like flying saucers. The unlikely juxtaposition cries out for explanation. Luxury watches are themselves curious attempts at alchemy. These objects attempt to escape their utilitarian origins along every axis. Their pricing rejects the logic of utility: thousands for a device that tells time (not quite as well as your phone)? So does their needlessly complex engineering: why use complex mechanical gears when you can use a ubiquitous and cheap quartz battery system? The devices are transformed through the ritualistic cooperation of obsessive craftsmen, expert machinists, marketers, and watch enthusiasts. 

DEREK BOSHIER

Born 1937 in Portsmouth, UK, Derek Boshier currently lives and works in Los Angeles. The artist first rose to prominence while still a student at the Royal College of Art, featuring in RBA Galleries’ landmark 1961 exhibition Young Contemporaries alongside classmates David Hockney, Allen Jones, R.B. Kitaj, Pauline Boty, and Peter Phillips. He has been both prolific and wide-ranging in his artistic production, working in such varied media as painting, drawing, prints, film, sculpture, and installation, among others. Mass audiences were first exposed to his work via The Clash’s 2nd Songbook, as well as David Bowie’s Lodger album cover. His collaboration with Bowie sparked a lifelong friendship, many subsequent collaborations, and a handful of David Bowie paintings. 

He has been the subject of over 91 solo exhibitions at prestigious venues such as: Flowers Gallery (1974 and 1976, London); Texas Gallery (1987, 1989, and 1991, Houston); Galerie du Centre (2003, 2005, 2007, and 2013, Paris); the National Portrait Gallery (2013, London) and Gazelli Art House (2017 and 2019, London). His work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions including: Art and The Sixties (2004, Tate, London); Pop Art: UK (2004, Galleria Civica di Modena, Italy); British Pop (2006, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Spain); Pop Art Portraits (2007, National Portrait Gallery, London); and Made in Space (2013, Night Gallery, Los Angeles, Gavin Brown Gallery, New York, and Venus over Manhattan, New York), among others.

His work features in numerous public collections internationally, including: the Tate, London; the British Museum, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen, Windsor Castle; the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh; the National Gallery of Poland, Warsaw; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Menil Collection, Houston; the Museum of Art, Ein Harod, Israel; Centro Wifredo Lam, Havana; the Bernardo Museum, Lisbon; the National Gallery of Art, Canberra, Australia; the Yale Centre of British Art, Connecticut; the High Museum, Atlanta; the Brooklyn Museum; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

GARTH GREENAN GALLERY

545 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.garthgreenan.com